


Two Years, Five Months, Twelve Days, Eight Minutes, And Seventeen Seconds.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-21
Updated: 2008-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:12:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it's better not to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Years, Five Months, Twelve Days, Eight Minutes, And Seventeen Seconds.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [This Night by Black Lab vid](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXrtjMWOMg) prompt by misslucyjane at the [Love-A-Thon 2008](http://community.livejournal.com/lucyjanesparlor/20823.html) at lucyjanesparlor.

Agent Alpha-Omega-Nine woke up with a headache and an erection and couldn't remember how he got either.

The orders on his wall were signed in plasma as per usual and were sealed, stamped, and approved. Target acquired, objective completed, good job, well done, have a three-day leave. The agent took one look at his battered, bruised body, took one look at his wiped control log, calculated the odds his superiors trusted him to never remember what they had made him forget, and ran.

Six planets later, he had a name, which lasted him six planets more. He found his way back to Earth, an old Earth, one earlier in his timestream, where the only agents he would meet wouldn't have been ordered yet to kill him on sight. He hoped.

Captain Jack Harkness. Missing in action in a time when missing in action meant they were never going to find the body. He took the name with ease, polished off the only Earth accent he had ever bothered to learn, and tried to figure out what he would need to trade the agency for his memories. He stockpiled and hoarded and built treasure traps, wondering what price they would put on his treason. And he nearly had them. He very nearly did.

And then Rose Tyler showed up and his life went to hell.

He was left for the slow path this time around, forced to avoid himself, forced to scavenge, forced to hide. When John Hart fell into his lap, he'd thought he'd finally had his collateral. And then it was all for naught.

The Agency was gone.

So.

They'd done it. Fulfilled the prime function. Fixed their paradox. Ensured that the Time Agency had never needed to be established. Jack had taken the preventive cure because his family was dead; there would be no one to go home to, if they ever fixed it. John had taken it, he'd said, because his parents were Time Agents. No Agency and he never would have been born. When the universe snapped back, he would have ceased to exist in every case. The paradox would have erased him. He'd rather be a non-person than have never existed.

The second time John fell back into his lap, Jack stole his controller and went back to Boe and watched his parents and Gray from a distance. He didn't exist, had never been born, they didn't know him. This is what he tells himself so he doesn't run to them, embrace them, and never leave.

"I was born in a paradox," he told Ianto to show him that he trusted him. "And not just me, my entire world for over four hundred linear years was born into a war that future histories state never happened."

"An alternate timeline?" asked Ianto, because he cared about labels, and Jack had shaken his head and kissed him and never explained about the monsters who had wiped his people out. The worst kind of monsters. Humans.

Because Jack isn't stupid. Some of the memories are coming back to him, slowly now, because the wipe was never designed to deal with what he is now. He dies so many times now in the line of duty that Tosh has started referring to his brain as a computer constantly forced to reboot. It should be no surprise that one day when he flashes back, it's all the way back, to a battlefield and holograms and secret orders, and his superiors staring down at him, crossing timelines with impunity, _because soon it won't matter_, and the Colonel, blue eyes impassive, asking him if he wants to remember, and Jack responding with shaking shoulders, _never_.

And then waking up. And running. He's never stopped. Staring at his fingernails in the ambient computer light, he wonders how much of it his subconscious remembered. It couldn't have been a coincidence that when he stumbled onto a Time Lord, he'd imprinted his loyalty before the Doctor had a chance to turn him down. He'd clung so hard, for so long, even when he was sure he was never going to get another chance. Another chance to have a god forgive him.

"Going to tell your lieutenant?" John asks him the third time he falls into their timeline, and he gives Jack the pill he'd scavenged from the wreckage of an entire civilization. The last true retcon pill in existence. Programmable and precise and priceless. Nothing like it will ever be seen on Earth again. Jack's already made sure of that.

Jack looks down at Ianto, asleep on his bed, and dryswallows. "Not a chance."


End file.
